Lullaby for the Rain Girl (17 page)

“Do you feel, like, older now?” she asked, taking my hand. “I do. Sort of.”

“I dunno. I guess.”

“I mean, we’re going to be in high school next year.”

“Yeah. Weird.”

We were quiet for a time, gazing at the stars, listening to the whirrings and chirrupings in the grass.

“Ben?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“What?”

She pulled her hand away gently and sat forward, looking across the dark field. “It’s about...”

“What, Sherry?”

“Oh, never mind.” She picked a reed of grass and slowly shredded it in her fingers.

“What? C’mon.”

She glanced at me. Then she sighed. “Ben—do you remember last summer? The Fourth of July? Going to the fireworks?”

Oh shit, I thought. But I said: “Yeah?”

She studied the field before us. I watched her profile in the moonlight. She was struggling to say it. “And when—when you looked at me—we looked at each other—do you remember what I’m talking about?”

I looked down. “I remember.”

There was a long silence. We listened to the crickets.

“Ben,” she said, turning her head toward me but looking at the ground, “did you—I mean...you know...did you...” She leaned close to me just for a moment, saying the words in a tone hardly above a whisper: “Did you
come?”

I didn’t respond for a time. I felt my face flush red. Finally I nodded.

She nodded too, slowly. “I thought you did.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. I just wanted to know, that’s all.”

“I shouldn’t have done it, though.”

She shrugged. “Girls do it too, you know.”

“Come?” Just saying the word to her caused me to get an erection.

“Sure. I mean, they can.”

“How? I mean...what does a girl...?”

“Well, nothing, like, comes out. Like with a boy. It’s different.”

“How?”

“It’s—it’s hard to explain.”

We said nothing. We seemed to bit sitting a long way from each other, yet we were very close.

“Ben,” she said at last, “do you ever, like, you know, play with yourself? That way?”

The flush passed through me again. I could hardly believe my ears. My breath was quick and shallow.

“You mean like...?”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes,” I admitted finally. “Do you?”

“Sometimes.”

“I didn’t know. That girls did.”

We were speaking in the lowest of murmurs, even though no one was anywhere near us. The houses behind us were a hundred yards back. No one could hear us or see us. The rest of the world was far away.

“Do—do you want to now?” I asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t now.”

“Why not?”

“I just couldn’t. Out here like this.”

Another pause.

“Do you want to, though?” she asked.

My mouth was dry. “Yes,” I said. “Can I?”

“Well, it’s up to you.”

“Okay.” Nearly unable to believe that this was happening, I reached down to my pants. She sat close and watched me pull down my zipper. My hard-on sprang eagerly into the open air, astonishingly naked against the darkness.

“Do you want to touch it?” I asked, my voice ragged.

“I better not.”

I leaned close, put my arm around her, and kissed her on the neck. We nuzzled for a moment. My hand reached awkwardly to her breast; her hand came up to meet it. I thought she was going to pull mine away, but she held it there. Through her shirt I could feel her nipple start to rise under my fingers. I had never known girls’ nipples could do such a thing.

“Why are you so interested in them, anyway?” she whispered quizzically. “They’re just boobs. They don’t
do
anything.”

“I guess,” I said breathlessly, “you have to be a guy.”

“I hear that in Africa girls walk around with no tops on at all.”

“Maybe I should move to Africa.”

She giggled. “Maybe you should!”

I groaned then, and ejaculated. It was the biggest ejaculation of my life. Her eyes widened, watching.

She didn’t say anything for a long moment.

Finally: “Are you okay?”

I laughed shakily. “I’m okay.”

“Wow,” she said, surprise in her voice. “You made a mess.” She peered toward the grass before us. “It’s so weird. That stuff makes
babies.”

“Yeah.”

“I just hope nobody notices when we go back.”

“Notices what?”

“About
us.”

I knew what she meant. It felt as if what we’d been doing would be written all over our faces. We sat together for a while in the darkness, just holding hands. I slowly caught my breath.

Finally I pulled myself together again and we made it back home, grinning what I was sure were shit-eating grins, but there were Mr. and Mrs. O’Shea, there was Alice, there was Dad sucking at what was left in a green beer bottle he held in his hand.

“Did you have a nice walk?” Mrs. O’Shea asked pleasantly. “Ready for lemonade, kids?”

2

What I’ve described strikes me now, reflecting on it all these years later, as utterly innocent. Early-adolescent fumblings was all it was; touching, kissing, figuring out how your own and someone’s else’s body worked. And despite my somewhat telescoped history here, it certainly wasn’t all about budding sex between us. Our hormones may have been rushing like the mightiest of rushing rivers, but a twelve-year-old boy can be satisfied sexually quite easily; there was no need for us to move forward especially quickly. Over the summer we became increasingly clever at finding places where we could be alone together, and we took small steps. I can remember quite vividly the first time she touched my erection, running her index finger along it for a brief moment. (“Feels like rubber,” she said. “Hard rubber.”) And I can remember the first time she allowed me to pull up her shirt and actually touch and kiss those breasts of hers which she thought so profoundly uninteresting.

Could there ever be anything better than hovering on the edge of thirteen, with June underway and a sweet little girlfriend to spend the long hot days with?

If so, I’ve never found it.

Summer waned; high school arrived. We were a public couple now, officially an item—“George and Mary” were the talk of the freshman class. In my work as a teacher I’ve sometimes seen young couples that have reminded me of how we were then: they seem to be aware of no universe outside each other. They’re never seen apart, except in such brief periods as their class schedules might require (and they go to great lengths to coordinate their class schedules, too). They finish each others’ sentences, like old married people. It’s the kind of bond that can only come from long periods spent exclusively together, in some kind of total sympathy with each other. It’s not about sex, at least not necessarily, not
entirely:
some of the most intense couples I’ve seen in school were, I’m positive, not sexually active—or at least, like Sherry and me, not fully so.

It may sound like the pleasant gloss of a quarter-century’s memory, but I actually think Sherry and I made one of the healthiest couples of this type I’ve ever known. We were certainly wrapped up in each other throughout high school, yet we did other things, too. Sherry ran on the track team all four years, partly because she enjoyed it, partly in a struggle to control her weight, about which she was growing ever more self-conscious (somewhat erroneously, really: I once overheard a boy in class describe her, quite accurately, as “cute—kind of chubby-cute—but cute”). 

I, meanwhile, was writing—mostly stories, and mostly the kinds of stories I most liked to read: fantasies, supernatural tales. I’d discovered Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, the entire
Twilight Zone
crew, and could spend endless hours reading or watching their tales and trying to write stories like theirs. Sherry and I no longer collaborated on jokey ghost stories; we’d grown beyond that, and anyway, it became apparent that writing was a genuine passion of mine, as it wasn’t with her. Sherry became my first (often only) audience, but I didn’t share a lot of what I wrote with her: just the very best stories. Something in me couldn’t allow her to see my ill-conceived or fragmentary efforts. I could show her only the finest.

My personality, then, showed itself early. Sherry’s didn’t. She bounced from interest to interest—singing (she was in Choir for a year), drama (she played one of the Witches in our school’s production of
Macbeth)
, swimming, horseback riding, crochet, gourmet cooking...it was a long list. Yet I was always delighted to go to one of her concerts, even if hers was only one of some thirty voices; to see her in a play or a track meet, or to serve as the guinea pig for one of her attempts at French cuisine. It was all wonderful to me. These interests, however, largely separate, also kept us from being too unhealthily involved with each other every minute of every day, which helped keep her parents from being too worried about the relationship.

Though they
were
a little concerned, Sherry told me. So was Alice, always my mother-surrogate. “Ben,” she said once, “you know I like Sherry—Sherry’s a really nice kid—but don’t you think...well, that you should see some
other
girls now and then?”

“I’m not interested in other girls,” I said.

Alice smiled and touched my shoulder. “You’re very gallant,” she said.

Our relationship was not, of course, all peace and light—we were adolescents, after all. There was the occasional fiery argument, the misunderstanding, the hurt feeling, the day or two of silence between us. There were my own issues with Dad: too often I was worked up, frazzled, by his latest shouting tirade against the goddamn Jews, goddamn niggers, goddamn etc. Sherry wasn’t present for these explosions (they never occurred when anyone outside the family was there), though she did tell me once or twice that she’d been able to hear his voice at home through her open window—and she heard him call me “Shithead,” too. At such times she was gentle with me. Her own home life was, as far as I could see, quietly uneventful; she got along well enough with both her parents, though she didn’t seem too attached to either one. In the absence of her own personal drama, she became a support system, a lifeline, to help me survive mine.

Sexually we moved along slowly, which is no doubt the best way. We were sophomores before she would open her pants enough to allow me to slip my hand in, in and down, then up, to feel what a girl was like inside—and to notice, rather to my amazement, that her pubic hair was exactly the same bright neon orange as the hair on her head. It was the first year for oral sex, too—my being on the receiving end, that is. (The other way didn’t happen until senior year.) I’m sure I was frustrated at times, I’m sure I pressured her occasionally, but in memory it all seems to have been a pleasant, slow march together, taking each other at our own pace. Certainly I’ll never forget one afternoon, alone in my bedroom together, the house deserted, her pants open, my fingers deep up inside her, when I realized that she’d closed her eyes and begun breathing fast, making little moaning sounds. Instinctively I moved my fingers faster. A few seconds later she inhaled suddenly and let out a small shriek.

“Oh my God, Ben,” she said breathlessly, after a long time, looking at me with an amazed, even stupefied expression.

What wasn’t perfect was the rest of the world. Dad had decided that Shithead needed to leave his house immediately after graduation. “You’ve never worked a day in your goddamn life,” he declared, throwing back another bottle of beer, “and it’s goddamn time you started.” Alice (who was under no similar requirement; she was welcome to stay as long as she wanted, apparently) tried to go to bat for me, suggesting that I spend the next year at community college, as she’d done, or get a full-time job and save to get an apartment. My father would have none of it. “I was on my own at
fifteen fucking years old,”
he proclaimed. “I’m tired of this
bullshit
in my house.”

The “bullshit” to which he referred is no clearer to me today than it was then. I was a kid who worked hard in school, came home on time, didn’t get in trouble for drinking or drugs the way many of my classmates did (though Sherry and I did filch cigarettes from her mother when we were sophomores, beginning a smoking habit which for me would prove lifelong). My grades were excellent—both Sherry and I finished in the top ten of the senior class—but my father radiated resentment toward me, resentment and disgust for me and, I increasingly have come to believe, Sherry’s and my relationship. But who knows? Maybe it was no more than the fact that I’d been growing my hair out since my junior year, hair that would eventually reach to my shoulders. It could have been anything, with Dad. Or nothing.

In any event, during senior year I did get a job as a busboy at a nearby restaurant, and pinched the proverbial pennies. I had no idea where I would go or what I would do—I was seventeen and had no experience of the world. What little I’d seen had been on those family vacations, now many years back, when Dad took Alice and I to Shasta Lake or Reno. Dad bought me a second-hand car my senior year—it was my graduation present, delivered early—“and one year’s worth of insurance. After that you’re
on your own.”
He spat it out vehemently. Sherry and I looked into possible schools, scholarships. We were determined to stay together, whether that meant remaining in the area or leaving. Sherry’s parents weren’t particularly pleased about that—they did tell her they thought it was time she went away, saw other people—but how much bitching can any parents do when their daughter is seemingly healthy, happy, and productive? And realistically they couldn’t complain about me or my behavior toward their daughter. I was an ideal boyfriend—respectful, helpful (I remember painting the exterior of the O’Sheas’ entire house a sunny yellow one summer), responsible. But I suppose from their point of view there was just so
much
of me.